A seasonal 'Bah Humbug' part of an old strip published by Punch a few years after El Maestro had finished at the NME.

Obviously a strip from the start of1981 making a point about the pseudo punk Toya Wilcox who was one of the most ludicrous acts ever. I read an interview with her in which she said that she would be happy to see cars burning in Chelsea along the Kings Road. Man, she'd have run a mile at the sound of the first match being struck and now has found her true level appearing on reality shows and cookery programmes. She was  a phony punk and I was amazed anyone took  her seriously. Her husband, however is an excellent guitarist and credible musician.

Tattoos ! The hobby of self mutilation wasn't compulsory back in the 70's, as it is nowadays when the merest square inch of flesh is attacked by needles, but back in the early days of Paula Yates it was a delicate butterfly on hidden part so the body, but the years has gone by, the flesh stretched as bodies bloated and now we have a fresh generation of tattoos with sharp needle work who will soon look like blue smudges.

Off hand I can't remember the date of the D day landings in France but this strip obviously refers to a reunion that must have been in the  news, although it obviously wasn't the 50th which would have been too late.

The fact a bank manager is in this strip dates it to the 70's, which is about the date when the last one was seen on the high street.

An early strip having a crack at ELP who had a notorious for having a huge crew and

 the huge number of trucks they put on the road. Greg Lake even had a roadie for the carpet he stood on during a gig. They were the ultimate vainglorious Pomp Rock outfit who almost single handedly caused the advent of punk they also caused the demise of Benyon who in a curious twist of fate wrote some of the lyrics for Greg Lakes first solo album. It's a complicated story and I'll try and piece it together over the next few days.

I've been sorting through the strips and economic slumps are a major theme, starting with the obvious no future, Thatcherite, Two Tone era. The ghost town theme is  deja vu all over again and recession is back and its bigger than ever. Pete Brown in the late 1960's made an album called "The Art School Dance Goes on For Ever". Well, the dance came to an end with the introduction of modules. You can only dance on your own in a module.

Has anything changed? Slumps, strikes, cuts, erk alors!

A drawing of Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull for for the NME in 1973. He looks a bit like I feel today. Anderson was an odd guy who the last time I heard was running a salmon farm in Scotland.

Well, this is an odd strip probably done on a slow news week, but I saw Adam Ant  on TV recently and looks to be in a better place. It's Christmas Eve today which means a longer walk on the beach and greater time spent in my favourite drinking hole with a much needed open fire. I'll watch everyone getting slowly plastered before walking home in the hope my sleep will be disturbed by a series of visiting spirits from present, past and future - unless like John Rotten I only get past, present and no future.

I guess this was a dig at how punks began by slagging off the bands that preceded them but later  began to share many of the same qualities and show traits of hippydelia.

Sparks from the NME

Everyone should have heard the hilarious Troggs' tape by now, typical of the many recording sessions that I've been involved with and of course the fashion for those types of recordings peaked with Clive & Derek. El Maestro released a memorable 'disc' and went on tour along with a Spanish band 'The Sex Beatles' and the magnificent Splogenessabounds in either their pre or post Punk Pathetiquem mode, I can't remember.

The strip above must have been published during one of the long hot summers in London leading to a water shortage and it includes a lot of other stories that must have been in the papers that week. It's a busy drawing and I guess influenced by Mad Magazine which Benyon always had lying around his flat and not just because of the great Don Martin.

Above is a much simpler strip involving El maestro and Sharko his manager. In the 70's Soho was filled with tiny offices occupied by dudes like Sharko working out how to hype their bands while avoiding paying wages and bills. Sharp, slippery and at the same quite hilarious, so long as they weren't managing you.

This has to be one of the earliest El Groover strips to appear in the NME. Note the hat and the horse head codpiece all this was at he peak of glam rock when bands were trying to be further and further out. Benyon called this his "anti cartoon strip style" designed to discomfort the viewer. The words were more important then the drawing, in his opinion, and it wasdone as a reaction to the Marvel Comics such as Conan which were truly huge at the time. I seem to remember his favourite was the Silver Surfer.

Benyon never set out to to standardise his Maestroship. From week to week all the characters looked slightly different and kept evolving while the "Spiders from Mars" playing endlessly in the background.

I apologise for this mornings poor writing, but I had an odd night last night. I sat listening to the waves hammering  against the rocks while I went through a pile of drawings and I began remembering things I haven't thought of for some while.

I was reflecting how different the music scene is today and I was wondering what Benyon would have thought of SPop Idol & X Factor. Maybe I'll find something in one of these boxes.

The drawing above must come from sometime in the late 70's and would have gone with an NME Wonder article but the drawing below is from theNME letters page known as Gasbag. Notorious for the editor of the week always having the last word. The nature of the page depended on the particular scribe and the odd Gasbag was edited by Benyon. I think there was even a picture of his with a bag over his head editing the page. It suited him.

 

The daily strip featuring Sharko, th'Groovers  manager. I suppose it could be dated to the nearest general election alongside the 2 Tone Ghost Town thing which could be early eighties or today.

I'm not sure if this strip was published. It seems unlikely it was because the IPC lawyers hated drug references. However the snow is seasonal and of course the Ice Queen reference means it was drawn when Thatcher was in office.  

The date this gag was published is also obvious, but off hand I can't remember when ET came out. Interestingly dope references were easier to get into cartoons than harder stuff. There was even an NME front cover with a Benyon drawing of a dazed looking Art Garfunkel with a thought bubble saying something like "I sure smoked too much dope".

Getting back to the Bakerloo Blues Line. The drummer, Keith Baker, played briefly with other bands while he was living with Benyon. Uriah Heep was one and the other a band called Daddy which changed its name to Supertramp but he didn't stay long with either band for different reasons. I seem to remember Keith's girl friend smacking Heep's lead singer across the face because he was swinging his microphone stand too near to Keith's drums, which hadn't been paid for. The BBL guitarist was Clem Clempson who went on to play with Colosseum and then Humble Pie

I went to the flat quite a few times during the May Blitz period period and I remember Benyon talking about the Album Sleeve. The record company, Vertigo, was also putting out the first Black Sabbath album featuring a mysterious, cloaked female. Evidently it was supposed to be nude shoot but the morning was freezing and the model refused to disrobe and wanted to keep her cloak on. I watched a Sabbath documentary on the making of that album and they talked about the cover but missed the story, but rock documentaries are usually incomplete or one eyed. Oddly enough Bakerloo Blues Line were a midlands bans and knew Sabbath really well from their days as a band called Earth and they had a lost of excellent Ozzy stories, none of which appeared in the documentary.

A Lone Groover strip from the NME which spreads over 2 images, but this is going to be the same for all the ones I scan. It has no date but it must have been from the end of the 80's and ponders the vapourised impact of Punk. It took me 2 posts to realise the image expans if you left click on the drawing.

The strip above must date from around the same time and includes El Maestro's manager, Sharko, who ripped him off at every opportunity in fact he was very keen on him killing himself to stimulate record sales and offered every him every encouragement. The idea for the gag must have come from a chap called Fagan (from memory) who broke into the Queens bedroom in Buckingham Palace one night and sat on the edge of her bed talking until footmen appeared and carried him off.

Another drawing that ended up in the NME during Glam Rock. It was about 1971, two editors before Nick Logan, that Benyon started working for the paper and before it developed its attitude and began selling zillions of copies each week. It's odd now to read cyberspace  factoids such as John Peel wrote the Lone Groover or that Ray Lowry drew the strip. Actually, Ray and Benyon had a good relationship and although they didn't meet up much they did correspond and shared the same opinions about the various scribes on the paper. Ray sent one of his famous postcards filled with his tiny scrawl warning his fellow cartoonist about Paul Morley who he had already encountered working on a Manchester mag and considered him to be a monumental poseur.

The collective noun for cartoonists is a 'moan'. Place more than one of them in a bar and the moaning of discontent will start within minutes. Bad pay, humourless editors, first ones to be sacked in editorial cutbacks, other cartoonists getting all the work who are truly unfunny, the weather, the quality of the beer....the list is endless. However Benyon and Ray agreed about Morley and his vacuous post modernist posturing and the dreadful impact the new wave of scribes would have on the string of clueless editors who followed Logan. Anyway R.I.P, Mr Lowry, who oddly enough lived near Salford but was not related.

Pronto was Th'Groover's roadie although I haven't as yet found a drawing of him carrying anything. He seemed to have total faith in in El Maestro in the full knowledge that he was a walking disaster who could only be relied on to let people down. I always thought a lot of this material came when Benyon shared a flat with a number of bands including the remnants of the Bakerloo Blues Line who were all trying to find new gigs. Terry Poole, the bass player, went on to play with a band called May Blitz and Benyon designed their album covers. But it was struggling bands zipping up and down the motorway that he found most interesting. He would always prefer to end up in a bar with musicians, agents or producers who had stories of failure and bad luck because they were always richer in detail than stories about bands who had made it. I remember Danny Baker saying he was pissed off with interviewing people who had nothing to say. Since then it's all got a lot worse as the cult of celebrity has engulfed creativity and reason.

In the late 80's a lot of aged performers had started creaking about onstage during the short pause before celebrity started to flood the market place and peroxide dumbos of both sexes fought to get their single brain cells in front of a camera. Big Brother and the X Factor were still being formulated in vats of acid with electrodes jammed in. It was at this point that El Groover stopped.....

I've sorted out a lot of  the drawings and I reckon my posts have shown the development of  the cod piece from pre Groover to the final strip and as the late great Ian Mac at the NME said to Benyon 'I don't know how it happened but we're running a strip about a guy in a stetson and  mask who talks to his prick' and the reply came back 'It's a bloody cod piece' of course most people made the same mistake and Gray Joliffe wrote his 'Willy' books on the back of it. But of course being ripped off happened to Benyon all the time, just like the Groover, look at all the saddos on Face Book who pretend to be a cartoon character. Kind of ironic "Eh kids !" as El Maestro would say

The strip above was an NME advert placed in Time Out in 1975

I've just realised these are the last Groover drawings that Benyon ever did and they appeared in Punch Magazine in 1989 a while afterthe strip had finished in the NME. Interesting to note how the rock crusade had ended already.